Fatal

by Michael Palmer

  CHAPTER 31

  THE DARKNESS IN THE CAVE WAS TOTAL, oppressive, and, for Matt, claustrophobic as well. The fumes were pungent, though not caustic in the way that chlorine fumes were—at least not yet. He sat for a time, composing himself, breathing through his shirt, with the unconscious girl resting beside him. Clearly, Armand Stevenson and his confederates had chosen to bury the human evidence of their transgressions along with their accusers. How many others like this girl were in the cave? Matt wondered.

  His ears were continuing to buzz unpleasantly, but from what he could tell, the bleeding from his nose had subsided. Every few seconds another chunk of rock dropped from someplace in the cavern. The roof hadn’t caved in but clearly it was unstable. For a time, Matt knelt there, listening to the rattle of falling rock, unable to shake the image of the delayed collapse of the World Trade Center towers. He was finally able to orient himself by focusing on the churning and splashing of the river, which ran behind where the chemicals had been stacked. The continuous white noise of the moving water echoed through the midnight blackness, and had a strangely calming effect.

  “Nikki?” he called out. “Hal?” From somewhere to his right, he was sure he heard a man groaning. “Fred?”

  He brushed some more dust and shards of stone from the girl’s face and hair. Her narrow face seemed intact, although there was no doubt she was badly disfigured. Poor baby. Clavicles, chest wall, arms, hands, abdomen, pelvis, legs. From what little he could tell, she had sustained no major injuries.

  “Nikki?” he called again. “Anyone?”

  For a few seconds there was only the sound of the river, then, “Matt? . . . Matt, it’s me.”

  This response was definitely not his imagination. Nikki’s voice, weak but composed, came from his left, some distance away.

  “Nikki, it’s Matt, are you hurt?”

  “I . . . I hear you, but I can’t make out your words. My ears . . .”

  “I know,” Matt said, speaking slower, louder, and more distinctly, “mine, too. I asked if you were hurt.”

  “I . . . I don’t think badly. My ears are messed up. They won’t stop ringing. I got hit on the head pretty hard, too. I don’t think I was knocked out, but I’m a little dizzy.”

  A second concussion, Matt thought. The word was often thrown around casually, especially in the ER, where head injuries weren’t considered serious by most unless there was a period of unconsciousness, X rays showing a fractured skull, or a CT scan demonstrating a hemorrhage or brain contusion. But he had seen many lives ruined and families torn apart by post-concussion syndromes, sometimes with as little trauma as a minor fall or fender-bender. He pushed himself up from the stone floor. His back and legs throbbed, and the backs of his hands were stinging, but the discomfort was tolerable—especially now that he knew Nikki had survived.

  “Nikki, can you stand?”

  “I think so.”

  “Walk?”

  “Let me see. . . . Yes, yes, I can walk.”

  “Wait!” he cried out suddenly. “Don’t move! Do you have any idea where your flashlight is?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Your flashlight.”

  “I . . . I was holding it when the blast went off. There’s so much rubble. I have no idea where it might be. I’ll look around and—”

  Her words dissolved into a fit of coughing.

  “Pull your shirt over your mouth to breathe. It helps. Nikki, just stay where you are and keep talking. I’m going to walk toward your voice. We’ll look for the light together.”

  Matt guessed she was twenty-five or thirty feet away. Shuffling through boulders, arms extended like Frankenstein’s monster, he inched his way through the blackness, guided by Nikki’s recitation of a country song he knew well.

  “Silver threads and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine . . .”

  Matt twice dropped to all fours to negotiate piles of rock.

  “. . . and I dare not drown my sorrow in the warm glow of your—Hey, I found it! I think it’s okay.”

  An instant later a beam of light filtered through the suspended silt, panning about until it locked on him. Seconds after that, they were together.

  “Oh, baby,” Matt said as they held each other. “I was so frightened you were hurt or—or worse. I can’t believe they would do this to us.”

  He took the light to check her. Blood was flowing from a gash not far from her healing gunshot wound. He pulled off one of his socks and used it to apply pressure to the cut.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “There’s a lot of blood on your face.”

  “My nose has been bleeding but I don’t think anything hit it. Probably the shock from the blast. No bones broken anyplace as far as I can tell. Weird as it sounds, we’re lucky. I think they expected the ceiling of this vault to collapse. From the way the rocks keep dropping, it still may.”

  Nikki swung the beam around the void. Because of the dust, visibility was limited.

  “What about the others?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. But there’s a girl over there—at least I think it’s a girl and not a woman.”

  “What?”

  “She’s unconscious. I bumped against her while I was crawling around. And guess what her face and scalp are covered with.”

  “Neurofibromas. Matt, this is awful. Could you tell if she was badly hurt?”

  “I don’t think so, but she’s unconscious. And I think I heard a man out there moaning as well.”

  “Hal?”

  “No idea. I’m worried sick about him. Wasn’t he right behind you?”

  “From what I remember, yes.”

  “Well, that would put him someplace over there, not where the sounds came from. Hal? Hal, can you hear me?”

  Nikki panned the flash along the wall. If Hal Sawyer had been standing behind her, he would have been virtually under the entrance from the tunnel, which was now an impenetrable pile of huge boulders and debris that extended up to the roof of the cavern.

  “I don’t see how he could have avoided being buried under that,” Matt said. “Hal? Hal, it’s Matt.”

  Silence.

  “Let’s try to find him, Matt.”

  They shuffled to the pile and moved a couple of rocks. Then they looked at each other and shrugged helplessly. If he was buried beneath this mass, there was nothing they would accomplish by digging except to exhaust themselves.

  “He was such a good egg,” Matt said finally. “Eccentric and quirky, but a real good guy just the same. He was so kind to Mom, and . . . and he loved me to pieces.”

  “I know he did.”

  “I just can’t believe this. Hal? Dammit, Hal, answer me. It’s Matt.”

  She put her arms around him and pulled him tightly against her.

  “Stevenson and those other bastards are going to pay for this,” he said.

  Nikki was reluctant to point out the obvious—that at this moment, their chances of surviving to make anyone pay for anything seemed remote.

  “Listen,” she said, “let’s get back to that girl.”

  The dust seemed to be settling a bit, making the beam of light more effective. The girl was there, twenty or so feet away, lying on her back, still unconscious. She was eleven or twelve, with long, corn-silk hair. Her narrow, distorted face, possibly pretty at one time, was filthy and battered. Matt was checking her more thoroughly than he had initially been able to, when they heard a groan from off to their right. A man lay there, supine, semiconscious, buried from the waist down. His head was lolling from side to side, and every few seconds his arms flailed impotently at the jagged rocks that pinned him down.

  “Oh, my God, look!” Nikki exclaimed.

  Not ten feet away from the man lay the lower half of a body—men’s work boots and overalls, protruding from under a huge pile of collapsed rock. And not far from him, lying faceup, only partially buried in rubble, was yet another man, minimally covered with debris, unconscious but clearly breathing. Nikki rushed to him
, leaving Matt temporarily in darkness.

  “Oh, no, Matt! Quick!” she cried, setting the light down to remove dirt and stones from the two. “He’s another one.”

  Matt hurried over, took the flash, and knelt down. The man’s silt-covered face was badly disfigured by neurofibromas. Probably in his twenties, he had a gash and a deep bruise on his throat where a rock had apparently hit. His respiration was labored and accompanied by stridor—the whooping noise produced when air is drawn in past a significant obstruction.

  “Well?” Nikki asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know, except that it’s a miracle any of us are alive. This cave was supposed to be a mass grave for all of us. We have at least one person dead and three—my uncle, Vinny, and Carabetta—missing. We have three people that we know of who are unconscious. That man thrashing around over there looks like he might be badly hurt, and this guy’s breathing doesn’t sound good.” Matt reached into the man’s hip pocket, produced a thin billfold, and withdrew his driver’s license. “Colin Morrissey,” he read. “Age twenty-two. From Wells.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Thirty miles south of here.”

  “So now we have two with neurofibromas. Do you think there are more?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. I can’t make much sense of this yet. But I do know one thing. We have a limited amount of air that’s loaded with fumes that are probably toxic, and one meager source of light with batteries that could last an hour or a minute.”

  “Not so good,” Nikki said.

  “We need to find some more light. If your flashlight goes out before we come up with something, we’re finished. We’ve got to find the one I had.”

  “Think we should try and help that poor guy over there first?”

  “Your call.”

  “Let’s see if we can free him up. He’s more awake than the rest. After that we can decide whether to help the others or look for your light.”

  “Okay. Once we’re oriented, let’s shut the flashlight off and move the rocks in the dark.”

  The man, heavyset and balding, kept crying out as Nikki and Matt cleared the fallen rocks off of him. They both knew the potential for disaster from his situation. Pelvis, abdomen, groin, legs, spine, muscles—in addition to fractures and internal injuries, there was the possibility of sudden death, usually from the release of clots formed in injured legs.

  By the time they had removed enough rubble to pull the man free, he was beginning to speak. His invective-laden babble was disjointed and garbled, but there was no mistaking his anger.

  “Fuckin’ double-crossers . . . you die, you die . . . Tracy . . . I love you, Tracy . . . can’t move . . . bastards . . . fuckin’ double-crossers . . . ”

  “Hey, calm down, fella,” Matt said. “Easy does it. We’re doctors. We’re here to help you. Nikki, put the light on my face, maybe that’ll help.”

  Another minute passed as first Matt and then Nikki attempted to get through to the incoherent man. It was Nikki who succeeded. She held her hand under his head, and had Matt hold the light away so that it illuminated both her face and the victim’s.

  “My name is Dr. Solari,” she said kindly. “Do you understand?”

  “Doctor,” he murmured.

  “Yes. What’s your name?”

  “Name . . . Sid,” he replied sluggishly, shaking his head as if to clear it.

  “Sid, what happened? How did you end up here?”

  “Double-crossed . . . bastards . . .”

  Nikki lifted his head slightly and brushed some of the remaining dust from his face. He responded to her touch. His head stopped moving and his gaze fixed on her.

  “Sid, what do you do? Who double-crossed you?”

  “Are you . . . really a doctor?”

  “I am.”

  “My legs . . . don’t think I can feel my legs.”

  Matt checked both of the man’s legs, then looked up at Nikki and shook his head grimly.

  “We’ll go over you and do what we can,” she said.

  “Wh . . . what happened?”

  “There was an explosion. We’re in a cave where they store chemicals. The entrances are sealed off. Whoever did this meant to kill us, but the ceiling hasn’t collapsed. So here we are. We have only this one flashlight, so we’re going to have to keep turning it on and off. Do you understand?”

  “There are . . . plenty of flashlights. . . . Big ones.”

  “What?” Nikki and Matt exclaimed in unison.

  “Cabinet on other side of . . . river. Gloves, lights, gas masks, first-aid kit, tools.”

  Sid began coughing spasmodically. Nikki lifted him and propped him against her knee, taking pains not to move the area around his lower thoracic vertebrae where it seemed his spinal cord was compressed or severed.

  “Who are you?” Nikki asked.

  “I’m . . . a guard here. Tommy . . . Where’s Tommy?”

  Nikki glanced over at the motionless lower body protruding from beneath a ton of rock. Sid followed her gaze.

  “Oh, shit! Oh, no! Double-crossing bastards. Sonofabitch. He had a little kid.”

  “People from the mine double-crossed you?” Matt asked eagerly.

  “No,” Sid said vehemently. “It was Grimes. . . . Fucking Grimes, and some guys.”

  “What did they pay you to do?”

  “Just look the other . . . way while they worked inside this place. I thought they were just going . . . to bury it all because of those guys who showed up here last week. . . . No one said nothin’ about people being in here when it blew . . . especially not us. . . . They shot us up with something to knock us out and left us to . . . Doc, my legs. You got to help me.”

  Nearby, the girl and Colin Morrissey had begun moaning loudly.

  “Whatever they used on you all must be wearing off,” Nikki said. “Matt, we ought to check that cabinet.”

  “Don’t leave me,” Sid cried. “I can’t move my legs.”

  “We’ll be back.”

  Nikki set him back down and took Matt’s arm as they made their way around the mass of barrels, many of which had spilled their oily contents onto the stone floor. Surprisingly, a number of them, mostly those at the bottom of the pyramid, remained secure.

  “Why do you suppose Grimes knocked them out with an injection and not a bullet in the head?” Nikki asked.

  “I suspect he was hedging his bets against the remote possibility that anyone ever dug in here and found us. There would be no evidence we were all murdered. A tour group, maybe, or else some environmentalists unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hell, mines and explosions are like Thanksgiving and turkey—especially this mine.”

  The river, about ten feet wide, flowed from their left to right with a modest current, its surface a foot or so below the floor of the cave. Two flat bridges with rustic wooden railings had been built across it, but one of those had been destroyed by several enormous chunks of rock. The river was already having difficulty negotiating the obstruction, and some water behind the new dam had begun splashing over the stone bank onto the cavern floor. The second bridge looked passable.

  “If this place begins to fill with water,” Matt said, “which do you think will happen first? We suffocate, or we drown?”

  “We’re going to find a way out of here, Dr. Rutledge,” she replied firmly. “Any more negative thinking on your part will be dealt with most severely.”

  “Well, let me ask you this way: Do you think we should be focusing our energies and oxygen on getting out of here or on stabilizing everyone who’s injured?”

  “Could you just ignore them?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then why did you ask?”

  “I was hoping you’d talk me into it.”

  The cabinet, made of hard, gray, molded plastic was where Sid had described. Fixed to the rock wall, it was seven feet high, at least that wide, and a foot and a half deep. It contained four powerful battery-run lanterns, three gas masks,
surgical masks, tools of all kinds, rope, duct tape, what appeared to be an exposure suit, and a large, fairly well-stocked first-aid kit.

  “We’re in business,” Matt said, pulling a surgical mask over his face and handing one to Nikki. “You ready to play doctor?”

  “Let’s.”

  They tested the lanterns, all of which worked, and carried them to the others along with the first-aid kit. On the way they got a better sense of the condition of the cavern. The two entrances, perhaps a hundred feet apart, were completely sealed by massive amounts of rubble. Most of the drums of toxic waste, though no longer piled in a neat pyramid, were still in the center of the cave. The ceiling, twenty-five feet up, was holding, leaving them with a good amount of air, albeit air heavily tainted with fumes.

  “No telling what this stuff is doing to our lungs,” Matt said.

  “Probably not the greatest of our worries right now. Where do you want to start?”

  “Colin Morrissey’s throat trauma looks like potential trouble to me, but I suggest we make sure there aren’t any people we don’t know about lying around, and take another look for Hal, Vinny, and Fred at the same time. Then we can move everyone to one area, triage, and do what we can.”

  The dust and silt were settling, but each of their steps sent plumes of it floating back into the air. The cries of pain had increased, and with them the sense of urgency. Matt and Nikki set the equipment down next to the young girl, who was beginning some purposeless movements. Then, each carrying a lantern, they began picking their way around the cave, scanning the rocks for bodies.

  “Over there!” Matt exclaimed after they had covered just a few yards.

  Fred Carabetta lay semiconscious on his belly, face turned to one side, pinned under a mound of rock that extended from his mid-back to beyond his feet. There was blood trickling out of his left ear, and what they could see of his face looked like a battered prizefighter’s.

  “Help . . . me. . . . Help . . . me,” he was moaning over and over.

  “Fred, it’s Matt. Can you hear me?”

  “Hear . . . you. . . . Help . . . me.”